1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to systems and methods for the use of template files, and in particular, to methods and systems for generating target file resources of a computer operating system platform from the template files.
2. Description of the Related Art
For any new file resource that is to be a text file, referred here as the target file, that requires changes only for a relatively smaller number of fields, referred here as changeable fields, over a period of time after its creation and that its unchangeable lines and unchangeable fields are known beforehand
Many operating system commands and individual application programs that run on various computers create the initial versions of new target files as empty files. Examples of such operating systems programs or application programs include but not limited to text editor program, word processing program, spreadsheet program, and database interface program. The conventional approach is that users of these programs need to manually expand the initial versions of the target files. Many operating systems on various computers allow users to invoke operating system commands and individual programs to process target files that they wish to expand or modify. These operating systems may also allow the user to initiate the execution of various background or system functions to process target files, some of which are quite complex in structures but contain many repetitive unchangeable fields. The tasks of processing these target files are mostly assigned to experienced technical professionals who know the inner structures of the files in details. A shortcoming of the conventional approach is that experienced business non-technical professionals who know the business functions of the programs are kept from directly processing the target files. For target files that are of the text file type, it would be useful to provide template files that contain the known repetitive changeable fields and to provide systems and methods to parse the template files for changeable fields and then dynamically generate dialog frame windows that prompt users, technical or non-technical, to enter input for the changeable fields. This approach saves the complex details of the structures of the target files from the business non-technical users and allows them to directly processing the target files. For target files that are not the text file type, it would be useful to provide to users an option that copies previously created template files to the target files.
Another shortcoming of the conventional approach is that manually expanding empty target files to versions of complex structures tend to be error-prone, even for experienced technical professionals. Moreover if a creator invoked operating systems programs or application programs to create and process too many target files without proper tracking (or logging) the activities, the creator may loose track of the folders (or directories) that store them and the purposes of processing them.